OCR Text

Cedar Rapids Gazette (Newspaper) - November 12, 1974, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
UPI Telephoto
Society for Women Features
UPI Telephoto
Condition Prompts Suit
Ronda Seamans, 21, lies in a coma at Doctors hospital in Coral Gables, Fla., her eyes open despite being unable to hear, speak or see. She has been in the coma since a car accident in June of I 973. Now the hospital has filed a lawsuit to evict because they say she has vitually no chance of recovery. Her parents believe she is getting better and a move to a nursing home is a threat to her life.
★ ★ ★
By Gazette Leased Wires
CORAL GABLES, Fla -The parents of a 21-year-old woman who has been in a coma for more than a year say they’ll fight a trespassing suit filed by officials trying to have her evicted from a hospital
Dark haired Ronda Seaman lies quietly in her sparsely furnished hospital room. lier lips move, but she says nothing. Occasionally she coughs.
The 21-year-old former college coed has been in a coma for Iii months — ever since her skull was smashed in an automobile accident on the Ding Island expressway in New York in June. 1973.
No Hope
Her doctors have given up hooe.
“With this kind of injury, with a smashed-in skull and brain, if they don’t wake up after a few months, that s it.” said Dr. Irwin Ferlmutter, who treated Ronda for three months. “I know of no exceptions ”
But Honda’s parents are in vehement disagreement.
“Doctors are not God,’’ says Irwin Seaman, her father. “We’ve heard of too many cases where children have
sc aked up. that’s all. Nobody’s God.”
Ronda was transferred to Doctor’s hospital here from New York in September, 1973. and that hospital now has filed suit to evict her. The Seamans have hired attorneys to fight the eviction and the battle lines are drawn
The Seamans have run out of health insurance and owe the hospital $65,WW. but hospital administrator Joseph McAloon says the issue is not the money.
“We’re not suing for the money, because this hospital is intended for the care of acutely ill patients,” McAloon said.
The issue, McAloon said, is that “she has reached the maximum improvement and there’s nothing else* the hospital can do to make her better.”
Irwin Seaman said he feels his daughter’s chances of recovery would Im* jeopardized if he followed the hospital’s wishes and placed Ronda in a nursing home.
Fight for Life
“I don’t care what the doctors say,” he said “There are too many cases when doctors have given up hope* on a patient and have been proven wrong. This girl is fighting for her life, and when someone
fights for her life, she needs every edge she can get.”
No date has yet been set for the trial, but if the case gets to court a flock of sticky questions could In* raised by attorneys for both sides Among them are the broad area of medical ethics. Who decides how much care a patient should get? Should community funds be used to support a “hopeless case?”
The Shufflers
Winners of the rubber game played Monday at Norridge Park Christian church were: North-south — Chris Chittick and Mary Ann Boardman. first, and Tait Cummins and Trudy James, second; east-west — Eleanor Fitzpatrick and Mary Farley, first, and Fsther Fitzpatrick and Doris Barker, second. The next game is scheduled Monday morning at 9 at the church
FLOATING FRUIT
Floating fruit in jam? You can prevent this by making sure the fruit is ripe and is cooked long enough.
Economist Warns Of Starvation In This Decade
AUSTIN, Texas (UPI) -The world fact's widespread starvation in this decade unless all nations act together to meet the crisis, British economist Barbara Ward said Monday,
“It will bt* a continuing crisis but not an unmanageable crisis if we do the right thing,” Miss Ward said. “We have to start exactly where we are, which is in grave trouble."
Miss Ward called for a wage-price freeze and a large grain transfer this winter to l>oor countries to help offset inflation and hunger. She said we must “cut our gross waste” and “avoid waste, recycle — let nothing go to waste.”
Miss Ward, speaking at a symposium on energy, said in the last generation the world enjoyed a balanced economy of supply and demand She said there was a seemingly limitless supply of cheap energy during a period of favorable weather that led to heavy agricultural production
But the demand is now outstripping the supply, she said, and this will bt* aggravated during the next decade by:
A possible change in the climate, a “cooling down, that would have a critical effect on agriculture,” and limiting the normal growth season.
A “sudden, violent,” change in the supplies of cheap energy-
The prospect of desperate poverty, disease and starvation among the world's poorest peoples, and the possibility of a “mega-crisis and megadeath ”
Miss Ward, also known as I^ady Jackson, said a wage-price freeze could slow inflation and a large grain transfer would head off mass starvation in the immediate future
(IN THIS DATE in 1973 the United States said it was considering a mutual security treaty with Israel as one way of assuring Middle Fast peace.
SALT LAKE CITY — Sarah Pierce used to live on welfare in a one-story house with leaky plumbing and a furnace on its last legs. But now the 86-year-old widow has given up all that for: A suite in a 13-story hotel with food, room and maid service, two color television sets, three telephones plus $50 a month spending money.
It all was part of a deal in which Mrs. Pierce, a widow since 1959, agreed to sell her home to the hotel which wanted the property for a parking lot.
Two apartment houses and seven other houses also were being torn down to make room for the lot. Mrs. Pierce wanted to sell but said she wasn't sure about the offer from Pearson Enterprises, owners of the hotel to move her into a suite.
“Everybody’s trying to get the property of old people these days, and I was scared. I didn’t want to sign,” Mrs. Pierce said. She sought the advice of her church, a lawyer and relatives from out of town and then decided to sell.
“It’s just fine,” says Mrs. Pierce now.
Dwain J. Pearson, board chairman of Pearson Enterprises, said the hotel (Tri-Arc Travelodge) agreed to purchase Mrs. Pierce’s property for $35.(KHI. He said $20,000 went to pay off a lien on the property and the remaining $15,000 has been set up to support Mrs. Pierce.
He said $200 is being deducted from her account each month as partial payment toward her suite and the services, and even if that runs out. the hotel will still keep her on.
Mrs. Pierce says she doesn’t miss her old house and she doesn’t miss scrubbing floors, washing pots and pans or shoveling snow .
“I can see the Mormon Temple from my window. I can watch them taking care of the lawn and flowers down below and know I don’t have to worry about them ever again. When it gets real cold in winter all I have to do is flip a switch and I get all the heat I want.”
From her $37.50-a-day suite, Mrs. Pierce can call a bellboy to chauffeur her in a courtesy car to Sunday school or visits to the doctor. A maid takes her to Relief Society, the women s organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-Day Saints.
She orders anything on the hotel menu — steak, prime rib, shrimp — and has it delivered to her rooms.
She s called the “Queen of the Tri-Arc” by the hotel staff. And. admits Mrs. Pierce, “They treat me royally."
AP Air folio to
Sarah Pierce, 86, who used to live on welfare, is served filet mignon for lunch by bellboy Ken Littlefield in her $37.50-a-day suite at a Salt Lake City hotel. She was given residence in the I 3-story hotel and meals for life in return for allowing the hotol to build a parking lot where her one-story house once stood.
MIA Wives Stage Protest
WASHINGTON (UPI) - As demonstrators picketed, the wives of three men missing in Southeast Asia read the names of I .KHI servicemen classified as missing in action and tossed a carnation for each of them over a fence onto the W hite House lawn
The demonstration, held by about 366 families and friends of the MIAs. came shortly after the supreme court upheld a New York court decision ordering the defense department to give families of MIAs advance notice and an opportunity to respond before declaring any missing men dead
The group also threw two extra flowers on the lawn — one for President Ford and the other for Secretary of State Henry A Kissinger — who they said had ignored pleas to come up with a full accounting of the missing men
Police said the flower tossing was illegal but no arrests were made
Wo men Miners Join Men on Picket Duty
By John S. I .anodon
EBENSBURG, Pa. (UPI) -Women miners joint'd the men on picket duty at soft coal mines here Tuesday.
About 40 pioneering women coal miners joint'd their male colleagues at midnight Monday in a strike against the Bituminous ('oat Operators Assn.
But not all of them wert* happy about the walkout, mostly because of the financial loss involved.
“I like the mine.” said Jo Ann Varner, 25. Stringtown. “I like the money, I like shift work, and I need to support a new four-wheel-drtve pickup truck I just bought in August.”
A white collar worker before she enten*d Bethlehem Mines Corporation’s No. 31 mine at nearby Nanty Gloa. last June 3. Miss Varner said she s “accepted now, and I’m
definitely going back” when the strike ends.
Eunice Cipolla, S3, Commodore, Pa., supports herself and two daughters, aged 14 and two, on her $43 a day plus $64 56 for Saturdays, and hopes “the guys are right who tell me a coal strike won’t last very long because of the energy situation."
She operated a shuttle car, or buggy, about 766 feet below the surface.
She said she “might just have to go back to driving a school bus temporarily to pay the rent, but 1 11 go back to the mines when it’s over.”
Her enthusiasm for what once was an all-male domain led to the enlistment of her
Al*
32.
a
niece, Debra Cooper, 26. berda, Pa., at mine No.
Rev lock Miss Cooper predicts strike will last only two weeks “before I can get back to the mine. I love it. Running a buggy is great and it s not nearly as hard as I thought it might be.”
The daughter of a disabled miner, she had not worked for two years after graduating from Penns Manor high school before she started 956 feet down as a miner Oct. 3.
ON THIS DATE in 1941, during World war Ii, the Soviets halted German invaders at the outskirts of Moscow.
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Welfare Woman Is Now Hotel Queen
Couple Leaves Show Business For an Indoor Plant Enterprise
Tub
Duty
Reading
Reading in a red bathtub is a special treat for these fourth graders at Highland elementary school in Columbus, Ohio. Teacher Beth Gillilian lets her students take turns on “tub duty” as an incentive to read library books and it works.
By Gay Pauley
NEW YORK (UPI) — When Lynn and Joel Rapp decided to get out of show business, they did a complete switch They became gardeners.
“We wanted a business of our own,” said Rapp, whose godfather was the late Eddie Cantor.
What spurred them even more was something the Rapps say is basic in all of us — “getting back to the earth. We are of the earth. People need nature.”
But because urbanization is crowding us out of that need, we’re turning increasingly to indoor plants, said the Rapps. And that is the direction to which the couple turned — he after 15 years as a television writer and she after running a modeling school and producing television shows.
No Formal Training
Neither had any formal training in horticulture although “we are plant freaks,” as Rapp put it. With an initial investment of $1,500 they opened a plant boutique in a West Hollywood, Calif., shopping arcade.
Four years later, they’d expanded to the whole arcade with their “Mother Earth” operation.
The next step was to record, in 1973, their mistakes and successes in a book calk'd “Mother Earth’s Hassle-Free Indoor Plant Book”, a basic guide to growing. It has sold better than half a million copies, they said.
Now they’ve written a sophisticated sequel to indoor planting called “Growing with Your Plants the Mother Earth Hassle-Free Way” (J. P. Tardier, Inc., Dis Angeles).
On a visit to New York, the Rapps discussed the “plant
fever sweeping the land’’ not only bringing more greenery into the home hut into stores, offices, banks, and anywhere else there is the new interest in plant culture.
Tension
Set
Mrs Kapp called plants (treat for the tension set - for the woman who gets hives if she can’t get to Gucci.
Recently they met with the president of a women s clothing store chain for what were to be discussions about tin Rapps opening plant concessions in its outlets.
“And all he wanted to talk about was why his philodendron was dying,” said Rapp. Rapp told him it probably was from the cardinal sin of plant care — overindulgente.
“People tend to overwater, overfeed, just the way they tend to overindulge themselves with too much smoking and
drinking,” he said.
“But no one really has a brown thumb. Moderation is the
rule for care.
“Buy plants from a reputable firm, and buy the right
plants for the right places.’’
Although they got into plants to get out of show business, the new enterprise may take them right back. Rapp s father, Philip, wrote scripts for many famous performers including the late Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice.
Now , Lynn and Joel Rapp have been asked to do a situation comedy “pilot” for television and also film a commercial on lawn care.
All will help to get the back-to-greenery message across, they hopi*.
Said Mrs. Rapp, “I look forward to the day when they take out parking lots and put in gardens."
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